What Two New Documentaries Tell Us About Bill Belichick and Tom Brady

One of the more intriguing subplots of the Patriots’ long-running success has been the clear difference in temperament between Bill Belichick and his longtime quarterback, Tom Brady.

Photograph by Matthew Emmons / USA TODAY / Reuters

On Monday, when the New England Patriots arrived in Minnesota for Super
Bowl LII, Bill Belichick, the head coach, descended the stairs of the
team’s plane wearing a black fedora. Here he was, football’s dour and
enigmatic genius, its coldly brilliant villain, literally wearing a
black hat. The sports media, always eager for imagery, pounced. But
after reporters asked Belichick about the uncharacteristic accessory he
explained that the hat had belonged to his late father, Steve, who
coached and scouted in college football for forty years. This was
classic Belichick, offering a prosaic explanation for a decision that
others wanted to invest with meaning or mystery.

New England fans have spent years trying to understand just who
Belichick is. His postgame handshakes with opposing coaches are studied
for body language and hints of intrigue; snippets of audio of him
coaching on the sidelines, captured from time to time, are closely
parsed. Belichick is famous for his curtly evasive answers during
league-mandated press conferences, but, on certain occasions, he has
rhapsodized at length about some esoteric fact of football history or
technical wrinkle in the game. These discourses have been treated like
sacred texts by devotees, who have found significance in the coach’s
thoughts on the minutiae of the rulebook, his ode to the long-snapper, and his eagerness to discuss the punting game.

For those looking for fresh insight into Belichick, the new ESPN and NFL
Films documentary “The Two Bills,” which tells the story of Belichick’s
complicated relationship to his mentor Bill Parcells, may disappoint.
The film, directed by Ken Rodgers, centers on an extended interview
conducted with both men, and, mostly, they have little new to add to
familiar stories. Parcells confirms that Belichick was a master of
schemes and preparation; Belichick confirms that Parcells was a talented
motivator and big-picture thinker. (This sentiment is also articulated in
interviews with their former colleagues and players.) The camera catches
the two coaches—Parcells coached the New York Giants, the Patriots, the
New York Jets, and the Dallas Cowboys—engaging in what passes, for them,
as banter, with Parcells asking Belichick if he still summers in
Nantucket and Belichick asking, in a series of mumbles, if Parcells’s
heart condition is O.K. Near the end, both men, with some prompting from
an interviewer off-camera, say that they love each other.

Belichick’s most unguarded moment in the film comes not from the
interview alongside Parcells but from older footage, shot during the
production of the NFL Films documentary “A Football Life,” which charted Belichick’s 2009 season, as the coach of the Patriots. A
camera crew follows Belichick as he tours the old Giants Stadium, not
long before its demolition, and pauses in the office he occupied as the
team’s defensive coördinator, under Parcells, in the nineteen-eighties.
“I was just trying to establish my coaching career. Be a good coach. Win
some games,” he says, succumbing to tears. “Damn, I spent a lot of hours
in that room.”

In a way, it’s a startling moment: Belichick isn’t known as a crier. Yet
the words that Belichick uses to express himself in the moment are
entirely familiar to anyone who has watched his press conferences or
interviews—the same sports platitudes which, when probed for deeper
meaning, yield nothing. Considering the passage of time and the full
sweep of his formative years, Belichick returns to his safest ground:
the specifics of preparation, the plain fact of the hours themselves,
and the desire to win some games.

One of the more intriguing subplots of the Patriots’ long-running
success has been the clear difference in temperament between Belichick
and his longtime quarterback, Tom Brady. Belichick, as several former
members of the New York Giants recount in “The Two Bills,” was known by
the nickname Doom, for the dark cloud of negativity that he carried with
him. Brady, meanwhile, as he has pointed out in recent years, whether
talking about scandals, politics,
or just about any other contentious matter, is a “positive person.” In “The TB12 Method,” his recently published health and life-style book, he offers a variation: “I am an optimistic
person who chooses to focus on things that bring me joy.”

In “Tom vs. Time,” another Patriots-themed documentary whose release has
been timed to the team’s playoff run this year, Brady’s optimism, and
the sense that he is living not only his best life but some form of the best life, is on full display. There are scenes with Brady; his
wife, the supermodel Gisele Bündchen; and their children in their large
and airy home outside Boston. The camera lingers on the nice clothes that
Brady wears, the luxury cars that he drives, the places he visits, and,
most of all, his body, seemingly unmarked from more than a
quarter-century of football. In “The Two Bills,” Belichick is clearly a
skeptical participant. Brady, meanwhile, gave himself over to the
director, Gotham Chopra, eagerly —the “Tom vs. Time” series, made up of
fifteen-minute episodes released on Facebook, is produced by Brady’s
production company and is part of a year-long publicity push for his
wellness company, TB12.

And yet while “Tom vs. Time” might be considered, essentially, an
infomercial, the life of its star looks, at times, rather narrow. As we
watch him prepare healthful smoothie after smoothie, or sit alone at the
table, eating a bowl of soupy green vegetables, Brady appears as a
curious ascetic living alongside extreme material wealth, somehow apart
from all that he has helped—with the assistance, of course, of his
extremely successful wife—to accumulate. “If you’re going to compete
against me, you better be willing to give up your life,” Brady says.
“Because I’m giving up mine.” A friend of mine texted me last week to
say that, after watching the first episode, he felt bad for Brady.

It’s also clear in “Tom vs Time” that, despite all his talk of
positivity, Brady is fuelled by resentments that he has nurtured, in
some cases, for years. In one scene, Brady pulls out a binder containing
documents from the previous season, and shows the suspension letter he received from the league for his alleged role in the Deflategate saga.
“Thank you,” he says, bitterly, to the camera. At another point, when
Brady talks about his fitness regimen, the film cuts in clips of Brady
running the forty-yard dash at the 2000 N.F.L. draft combine, looking
sluggish, and shows the infamous photograph of Brady standing shirtless
at the same combine, in a pair of long gray gym shorts, looking very average. Brady now, at forty, somehow looks younger than he did at twenty-two—an
exemplar of the modern American pursuit of fitness. “All these
life-style choices that you’re making, in order to do what?” Brady asks
at one point. “In order to win.”

As Belichick and Brady have prepared for their eighth Super Bowl
together, the press has struggled to find something new to say about the
two men—hence all the attention on Belichick’s hat. The consensus seems
to be that the outcome of the game against the Philadelphia Eagles won’t
really affect the so-called “legacies” of either Belichick or Brady—that
there’s nothing greater than the greatest ever. In this sense, Sunday’s
game will be played on their shared terms. “Did you win or did you
lose?” Brady says at one point in “Tom vs. Time.” “End of story.”

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.